


Keeping Sharp

by musicforswimming



Category: Avatar: The Last Airbender
Genre: Age Difference, Mentor/Sidekick, Other, Threesome, Threesome - F/M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-04-30
Updated: 2010-04-30
Packaged: 2017-10-09 05:47:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,948
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/83689
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/musicforswimming/pseuds/musicforswimming
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Three years after the war's end, Sokka appeared at his gate again.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Keeping Sharp

**Author's Note:**

  * For [inlovewithnight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/inlovewithnight/gifts).



> Written for **inlovewithnight** at **[avatar_minis](http://avatar-minis.dreamwidth.org)**; she requested Sokka/Piandao. This ended up more threesomey, but I hope you don't mind that, bb.

Three years after the war's end, Sokka appeared at his gate again. No Avatar, sister, or Earthbender with him this time, but Piandao knew even from a distance, in the fading embers of the evening sun, the garb and carriage of a Kyoshi warrior. In the sunlight of the day, her armor glittered as Fat led them up the walk to the house. Piandao didn't wait for them inside this time, but went to meet them at the door, ignoring how Fat's eyes widened at the impropriety of it. "Sokka, Suki," he said, smiling at them and motioning for Fat to bring them drinks. "It's been too long."

"Master," Sokka said, and they both bowed, a gesture he returned. Their faces were still studies in calm as all three of them straightened, but Sokka wasn't one to hold his feelings back, and after his eyes darted at Suki a few more times, he finally plowed ahead. "We, you know, we haven't been up to much lately, and everyone else is still busy with all this diplomacy stuff, but we're not really very into that, so we decided we'd go on a trip together, and we thought we could take a few weeks to hang out with you and train maybe possibly?"

"Sokka!" Suki said, appalled. "Could you try being a little ruder?"

"What? I'm no good at stealth, he knows that as well as you do."

"Or manners, apparently. We're not at the South Pole here, Sokka, we're -- "

"Hey, what's wrong with the South Pole?"

"Nothing's wrong, I hope, that you'd _need_ to refresh your training?" Piandao cut in, and did not bother trying to hide his amusement at their bickering, or his delight at the clear affection between them that made them so easy with one another. In truth, he saw in them none of the tension that they had carried when the war ended, and as they rushed to reassure him that Aang and Zuko and the rest had things well under control, he could read it -- they were simply bored, and with their friends about the business of peace, the warriors who now stood before him found themselves adrift.

"Well, then, I would be honored to have two heroes such as yourselves as my guests," he told them. "And if my knowledge may be valuable to you, that will be a greater honor still. It's been a long time since I visited Kyoshi," he added, and if it was possible, Suki stood up even straighter, lifted her chin a little higher. "Perhaps I might beg a few sessions of training with you, Suki."

"The honor would be mine, Master." Her face was calm as she gave a little bow of acknowledgment, impassive. "I put Sokka through his paces pretty well, normally," she added. Without a warrior's gaze, Piandao might've missed the twitch at the corner of her mouth and the sparkle in her eye that her battle paint couldn't hide, for they were subtle to begin with and both were gone as quickly as they appeared. Looking straight ahead and so not able to catch the subtleties of her face, even Sokka blanched a little, a flush spreading across his cheeks. "But I don't think a bit of variety in training would hurt either of us. That's why we came, really."

Piandao smiled and nodded, and just then, Fat reappeared with a tray containing a bottle of wine and three glasses. As he gestured for them to join him in a cup of wine, Piandao took stock of how they moved in tandem, aware of each other even if they weren't conscious of it. He poured, they drank, and he wondered whether he would have a chance against the both of them.  
   
   
   
   
They settled into an easy routine of training -- basics, mostly, but as he and Suki continued to try explaining to Sokka, basic elements of techniques were at least as important as the most advanced forms, but it was the evenings that they all came to look forward to. Worn out from the day's exertions, they would part for a couple of hours' time to change and bathe (and to rest, in Piandao's case and, he thought, Suki's, since she always seemed refreshed later, while Sokka, who had no problem with flopping down in the grass or on one of the chairs for a nap during the day, never really needed it as much to begin with), then rejoin for dinner, and spend hours into the night drinking and telling stories of everything that came to them. Eventually, he would escort them as far as his own room -- showing them the way ought to have been Fat's duty, of course, but it was too late for him, and anyway, their room was just past Piandao's and on the other side of the hall. Without fail, just as it came time for them to continue on, they would wait just a little too long, and once, Piandao looked back over his shoulder from his open door, and caught Sokka doing the same. The young man whipped his head back around and nearly ran through his own door, and it only set Piandao to wondering even more.

The walls were thick, but he heard hushed voices before their door closed, her soft laughter and then noises so small and so muffled that they could only be the vocalizations they let slip in the midst of a kiss. Though he'd thought himself sleepy before, now he found he was wide awake, and he stared at the ceiling after giving up on reading, then tried to control his breath when his ears caught the sound of muffled thumps and still more laughter from down and across the hall.

He finally tried to broach the subject of their pauses with them after another week of this. When he began to ask Sokka, he seemed to understand where this was headed, and proceeded to get chattier than ever as a defense. It was nearly enough to confirm his suspicions, which those first few nights he'd shrugged off as the delusions of a lonely (and dirtier than he'd previously suspected himself) old man, but still he _was_ older, and sometimes, in his solitude, he was lonely, and thus there could be no telling that he wasn't imagining it, perhaps even hoping for it. So it was Suki he asked, one evening, when he could hear Sokka singing loudly and off-key about secret tunnels as he splashed around in the bathroom. Suki was wiping her makeup off, had answered his rap at the door with it half gone already, her hair down and a robe about herself, presumably waiting for her own turn. It was the first time he had seen her not entirely composed, and he ignored her blushing because he could feel a heat in his own face.

"Is something wrong?" she asked, frowning and looking around, already stiffer, on the lookout for whatever invaders she might be expecting.

"Not at all," he told her, and motioned to the mirror, where her washcloth and bowl of water still sat. "Please, don't let me interrupt. I only had something I wanted to ask you -- something of a little more delicacy, which Sokka doesn't seem interested in discussing."

"If it's about Sokka," she said, her frown returning as she crossed her arms over her chest, "I won't betray any of his confidences, Master or no."

"I wouldn't dream of asking you to." Piandao didn't sit, because even if it was his home, this was their space in it by now, and he had put her on her guard already, coming here while she was (they were, he thought, as Sokka warbled out a particularly high note) so _un_guarded. "It's about both of you."

She sat at last, and picked up the cloth again, the set of her shoulders a little too high for him to mistake her for relaxed.

"You always hesitate when we part," Piandao said, finally, because they understood each other, and if one of them dissembled than the other would too. "Both of you. Though you always seem tired enough by the time we all resign for the evening."

She dropped her eyes to the bowl of water, by now a pale, muddy pink with the paint she'd wrung out of the cloth. "As I said, I thought some variety in training would be good for Sokka -- for both of us." It was a seeming non-sequitur, and so the true meaning was clear at once, the double entendre falling off her newly-bare lips. As on that first day, with her comment about putting Sokka through his paces, there was another quirk of her mouth, lightning-fast, so that one who couldn't see as the three of them could would not have caught it. Now as she looked back at him in the mirror, it only seemed that her eyes were a little _too_ wide to be really indicative of innocence, and it was clear that she understood him entirely -- and, therefore, that both of them did.  
   
   
   
   
So Piandao found that between the two of them, he could indeed be outmaneuvered. He escorted them from their wine that evening, as always, and as always they faltered a little, the only time both of them did (for where one was hesitant, of course, the other could be relied upon to charge forward) -- for once, Suki allowed uncertainty to bloom across her face, even if only for a moment, while Sokka let it hang clear as clouds on his, and for once, Piandao did not turn away, but stood there and continued to face them. But he didn't move towards them, either, and if he didn't betray his own uncertainty -- indeed, his own desire -- with his face or any change in how he stood or held himself, then that wasn't to say that he didn't feel it.

"Come on, Suki," Sokka said at last, his arm going around her waist as she let him guide her away. He caught Piandao's eye before they turned -- for tonight, it seemed, they were the ones who turned away first. They were challenging him; they had been from the beginning, of course, but only now did they have the confidence to make it clear, and only now had he allowed himself to acknowledge it. He turned away from his own door, and his sandaled feet sank into the carpet as he walked the few more strides it took to reach their room.

When he knocked again, Suki was sitting on the bed, her sandals forgotten on the floor, her bare feet and ankles pale in the dim lantern light of their room. It was Sokka who answered the knock, and he seemed more at ease than Piandao had ever seen him. "Master," he said.

"Piandao, Sokka," he told him, and smiled at them both. "I've told you so many times already -- if you're to stay here, it's to be as my friends, not my students."

Sokka grinned at that, and from the corner of his eye Piandao saw that Suki did, too, that she seemed to grow a little smaller as she let herself be at ease.

They were a challenge together, and here, mostly retired and with peace in the land, it had been three years since he'd faced a challenge. But, he decided, as he bent to meet Sokka's kiss, if one's destiny lay in the direction of master swordsmanship (swords_person_ship, he reminded himself, when the hand Sokka lit lightly on his hip grazed a bruise Suki had given him yesterday), one wouldn't get there by only taking on the easy fights.


End file.
